Yeah, I showed the white feather. But don’t be too hard on me. After all, lots of dinosaurs were carnivorous. This was a bit of data I picked up once when I was a kid and my public school class was taken on a field trip to the local Museum of Natural History. There was this pile of bones set up in the center hall there and it was a dinosaur skeleton, and the Teach said how back in prehistoric times many dinos had been meat-eaters. It stuck in my mind because of what happened when I went home to dinner later that night.
“Eat your spinach!” my mother had said. “You have to eat your vegetables if you want to grow up to be big and strong and healthy.”
“Mater,” I’d pointed out, “there’s a bug in your logic. Consider brachiosaurus. This giant-sized prehistoric reptile always ate its vegetables. But one swipe from King Kong’s paw and it was a dead pigeon!”
“Don’t argue with your mother! Eat your spinach!” my father had growled.
“Pater,” I’d attempted to reason with him, “think about what eating vegetables did to the roc. This huge herbivorous bird devoured vegetables, and look what happened to it. It flew around in ever decreasing concentric circles until finally it flew up its own anus. That’s what eating vegetables did to the roc!”
“I’ll ‘roc’ you!” Dad had thundered, swatting me across the dinner table. My father, you see, had never heard of the theories of permissive parenthood. It was a traumatic bash, and it made a very deep impression on me.
It wasn’t as traumatic, however, as having an angry dinosaur charging me. Just knowing that the beast was carnivorous filled me with the insecure feeling of a lamb chop on sale at the A & P, a lamb chop looking out the window of the freezer compartment and into the eyes of a bargain-hunting housewife. Identifying that way, you can see why I bolted.
Herr Dino (or maybe it was Frau Dino; I didn’t take the time to investigate) bounded after me in hot pursuit. Seeing this, I redoubled my pace, my gilded unmentionables swinging wildly in advance of my flight, the purple-pink slippers kicking up the prehistoric ooze at my heels. Naked I fled; naked the dinosaur pursued.
I beat him to the grove by a length and a half. Not bad for a muddy track. I was well up the first tree by the time he crossed the finish line. Pulling myself as high up in the Winner’s Circle as I could get, I thumbed my nose at his futile efforts to dislodge me by shaking the tree.
After a while the dino gave up and loped back to the egg. He (or she; search me) perched on the egg and leveled a steady and unfriendly squint in my direction. When I experimented with climbing down the tree, the beast was up and loping towards me immediately. I hauled my golden gifts back up to safety and the dino reassumed its eggy seat.
About a half hour later the second race began. The dino was in the running again. His competitor was a naked gentleman who’d attempted to cross the clearing where the egg was being mothered (or fathered; suit yourself; personally, I don’t give a damn). Halfway across, man and dino spotted each other and they were off and galloping.
It was damn near a photo finish. The man was scrambling up my tree when the animal reached the base and snapped a toothpaste commercial at his bare, hairy posterior. I reached down, grabbed the Piltdownish10 looking gent under the arm and hauled him to safety before those teeth could render him half-assed. I thumbed my nose at the dino. He grunted like an earthquake showing off and ambled moodily back to the egg. He sat down on it and continued to stare at us. His attitude seemed to say he could wait.
The naked Neanderthalian (if that’s what he was11 ) was also staring. My unexpected appearance and rescue of him had obviously filled him with surprise. Now, as he eyed my pink feet with their purple pom-poms and my gold-sparkling groin-ery, his surprise turned to awe. He jumped to a conclusion. This was expressed by his falling to his knees with his head between his outstretched hands and his rump bobbing in the leaves as if it personally wanted to give obeisance to me for its escape from the dino molars. Considering his precarious perch on the tree branch, it wasn’t an easy position for him to maintain. I grabbed him by one uncivilized armpit before he could topple. Even as I held him, however, he continued to genuflect. It was obvious that he thought I was some sort of god he had to thank and pay homage to at the same time.
“Relax, buddy,” I told him in a kindly voice. “I did what anybody would have done. I’m nothing special.”
He obviously wasn’t convinced. The expression on his face said he was puzzling over the proper etiquette to please this “god” with whom he shared the tree. He kept looking from me to the dull sun in the sky, as if convinced that was my point of origin.
“I’m not from Heaven,” I told him. “There’s nothing magical about me. I’m just an ordinary Joe like yourself.”
He muttered something that sounded like “glugwhumpf,” folded his hands and set them down before my gilded testes as if dedicating himself to them.
“Okay.” I moved back nervously. “Thanks. So we’re friends. My name’s Steve.” I pointed at myself and repeated the monicker. “Steve.”
A few more times, and he seemed to understand. He pointed at me and grunted something that also sounded vaguely like “Steeb.” Then he pointed at himself and said “Crap.”
“You shouldn’t be so self-deprecating,” I told him.
“Crap,” he repeated, sticking his middle finger against his belly again.
Well, if that was his name, that was his name. What’s in a name, after all? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Crap, however, did not smell like a rose. He smelled like . . . Well, like his name. He smelled like Crap.
“Your deodorant’s letting you down,” I told him in a friendly tone.
He smiled, jabbed himself again, and said, “Crap.”
I deduced this conversation was going to be difficult. It was sad. Two men treed by a dinosaur in an evolving world, and we just couldn’t seem to communicate. I Wondered if Crap felt as alienated as I did.
In the silence, I took a good look at him. Crap was about five-two, very stocky, very muscular. He had a scraggly beard and very long, unkempt hair. At first glance, I missed his not carrying a guitar12 .
His skin was a sort of an off-white gray, very pale, but tough looking like the hide of an animal that spends most of its time outdoors. His forehead was very high and his features were quite flat, the nose wide, the cheekbones large but not defined, the eyes very small and close together and lost in a flat desert of flesh. His legs seemed quite short and were bowed; his arms, however, were very long, almost gorilla-like, and his hands dangled all the way to his knees.
“Steeb.” Crap interrupted my appraisal. He’d crawled out on the branch and knelt there, watching the dinosaur. Now he pointed and I looked.
A second dino had appeared on the scene. It had come up to the first one and was nuzzling it like a teen-age kid making a pass at his girl friend in the balcony of a movie theatre. The first dino got up off the egg and nuzzled back flirtatiously.
Well, there’s no accounting for taste. I mean, I would have thought that a dino wouldn’t have much appeal—even to another dino. But in this case, at least, beauty was in the eye of the beholder. I’d been wrong in thinking esthetics might have played some part in the extinction of the dinosaur. From the way those two dino kids carried on, it became obvious that cupid wasn’t at all choosy about who he laid his arrows on. They bounded across that plain panting with passion all the way and disappeared over the hill to what I assumed must be the local dinos’ Lovers’ Lane.